I’m voting for Tyler Gernant tomorrow. He’s a young man with considerable intelligence and promise who is the strongest — and the strongest by far — of the four candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for Montana’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Gernant’s opponents are lawyer-rancher Dennis McDonald, writer-activist Melinda Gopher, and former Common Cause in Montana director Sam Rankin. Only McDonald has the money and widespread support to present a serious challenge to Gernant. Both Gopher and Rankin are using their primary candidacies as soapboxes to promote ideas; neither will receive more than a few percent of the vote.
Rankin and Gopher should not be dismissed as crackpots or distractions. They’re running not to win (not that they would ever admit that), but to present and promote ideas. Their candidacies provide platforms — soapboxes — that heighten their visibility, amplify their messages, and increase their credibility, and are but the latest in a long line of honorable soapbox candidacies in American history. Eugene Debs’ runs for President and William F. Buckley, Jr.’s quixotic run for mayor of New York City — his book, The Unmaking of a Mayor, is a classic — are among the quintessential examples of the genre.
Gopher in particular is interesting, both for her adroit use of her candidacy to mount a soapbox — the Huffington Post — big enough to reach a national audience, where she delivered a powerful pitch supporting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and for her blog, www.melindaformontana.com, that she could easily turn into a book on her campaign. Unlike Buckley, she won’t demand a recount if she wins, but just as Buckley lost the election but won the campaign, how she handles herself after her defeat tomorrow could have a lasting impact on issues that Montana faces.
Rankin has a laundry list (warning: everything is in upper case type) of positions on issues. Judge for yourself. I judge his willingness to cut Medicare and Social Security as wrong and unacceptable, and worthy of a nomination for Scrooge of the Year.
That leaves McDonald and Gernant as the candidates with the resources to mount serious statewide campaign. McDonald is 65 years old, a good Democrat, a man of accomplishment and substance. But he’s too old to be starting a Congressional career, and his campaign exhibits the creaks and wheezes of a last hurrah.
Gernant, by comparison, is hungry. He’s running a tightly organized campaign, a tactically brilliant campaign that inspires his supporters. Gernant, not McDonald, is the future of the Democratic Party in Montana. My sole complaint, and it’s not a trivial complaint, is that he sometimes pussyfoots around issues, has trouble giving a strong, straight answer to a straight question, and does not exhibit the degree of historical vision that I believe we need in Congress. He’s very much focused on the here and now, on Montana and the present.
That may be politically wise in so conservative a state, but that’s not what the nation needs. We’re in major trouble in this country — in trouble on health care, energy, financial structures and practices, foreign misadventures, and our ability to make decisions — and it seems to me that Gernant either does not understand this, or lacks the courage to say so. We need broad reforms: a single-payer health care system, not Obamacare; an energy policy predicated on a recognition that Peak Oil is a reality; a break-up of the big banks and an end to credit default swaps and other financial nitroglycerin; immediate and full withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; a U.S. Senate that operates by majority rule unless otherwise required by the Constitution — and we need politicians who understand this, and have the courage and wisdom to say so.
Gernant’s reticence on these transcendent issues is one reason why I’ve waited so long to endorse him. The other is my deep and abiding anger, fury to be blunt, at the Democratic Party for bungling health care, the kind of anger that makes a man unwilling, indeed unable, to make the distasteful choices that politics often requires. But a comparative lack of historical vision is an affliction of youth that time will cure. The counterweights are Gernant’s energy and optimism, and his sparkling intelligence. McDonald represents the past. Montana should hitch its future to Gernant’s rising star.